The importance of stockpiling

Cataclysm is right around the corner now, the elemental invasion is ruining Orgrimmar and Thunderbluff (or Ironforge and Stormwind) and at least on my server everybody and their mother is waiting in the cities for the elementals to come. I did not expect that to have a negative impact in my Action House adventure, well it did...

That's right, Lichbloom is the best example at the time of writing but herbs are dissappearing from the Auction House and prices are rising to a level unseen for a long time. Glyphes are selling better than ever but I can't restock and I'm slowly, but surely, starting to run out.

Thankfully it's Friday and I'm expecting the supply to rise again during the weekend when casual Joe is escaping the depressive November weather outside by farming the crap out of Scholazar Basin and listing his Adder's Tongue for 20g a stack.

At least that's what I'm hoping for, if I'd have to make an educated guess most casual players are probably going to do the same thing everybody else has been doing all week; hang around the cities, kill elementals and group for the four new bosses.

Important learning point

Even though I haven't really been able to start stockpiling Ink of the Sea I should have had a much bigger fallback stock at this moment. It's such an amazing time to be a Scribe on my server at the moment with only two serious competitors, one of which is probably having the same problem I've got and has become a lot less active over the past few days. I could be making an absolute killing but can't due to dwindling supplies.

I'm definately going to make sure this doesn't happen again, I should have made arrangements with farmers over the past weeks so I could at least let them know I need more herbs. I also should have purchased every single stack below my treshold instead of getting what I needed and hope for prices to drop, other people have reported herb prices to drop so I was expecting that to happen on my server as well.

How to start making gold with glyphs

In my opinion the most challenging profession to start making gold with is Inscription. You have to have some form of automation or be willing to sit behind your computer looking at the AH screen for hours at a time. A total of 340 glyphs is a lot especially if you want to be selling them all at just a little bit under your competition.

You also have to invest some gold before reaching it's full potential, with the 4.0.1 changes a new scribe is looking at the following expenses:
- 57 Books of Glyph Mastery
- 603 Inks to craft all glyphs available from trainers and books
- Two banking alts and 6 Pack of Endless Pockets to hold all of them (eventually you'll need 8 Packs and skip a few glyphs)
With this you've only crafted each glyph available without the Northrend and Minor glyph researches once, in order to be succesful at selling glyphs you're going to need a lot more Inks though. On my server this comes down to about 6.5k gold, if you've been collecting the needed Inks beforehand.

But what if you don't have 6k available but want to start making some gold right away? I would recommend starting with all the glyphs available from trainers which are listed on Elitist Jerks as best choices and the first two available from your first Northrend and Minor researches. At time of writing this are the following glyphs:
- Glyph of Arcane Blast
- Glyph of Arcane Missiles
- Glyph of Arcane Power
- Glyph of Backstab
- Glyph of Cleansing
- Glyph of Crusader Strike
- Glyph of Death Strike
- Glyph of Disengage
- Glyph of Dispel Magic
- Glyph of Divine Favor
- Glyph of Earth Shield
- Glyph of Earthliving Weapon
- Glyph of Ferocius Bite
- Glyph of Focus
- Glyph of Froststrike
- Glyph of Healing Stream Totem
- Glyph of Holy Nova
- Glyph of Ice Lance
- Glyph of Icy Touch
- Glyph of Imp
- Glyph of Incinerate
- Glyph of Insect Swarm
- Glyph of Lash of Pain
- Glyph of Mage Armor (if possible)
- Glyph of Mending
- Glyph of Mind Flay
- Glyph of Misdirection
- Glyph of Moonfire
- Glyph of Mutilate
- Glyph of Plague Strike
- Glyph of Power Word: Shield
- Glyph of Raise Dead
- Glyph of Rebirth
- Glyph of Rejuvenation
- Glyph of Scourge Strike
- Glyph of Shadow Bolt
- Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain
- Glyph of Sinister Strike
- Glyph of Soul Swap
- Glyph of Water Shield
- Glyph of Word of Glory
- Glyph of Wrath

After you've created two of each glyph make sure you know how much each glyph cost to make, I personally spend max 5 gold on each Ink which results in a maximum cost of 15g 50s. Of course I want to make a little bit of gold on each sale so I won't list a glyph below 20g buyout.
Since some of these glyphs will be made in bulk by levelling scribes you wont be able to list all of them all the time (unless you're willing to sell them with a loss) but you should be able to list enough to make a little profit every day. Keep investing that profit in Book of Glyph Mastery and don't forget to do each glyph research whenever possible and your daily profits should increase steadily.

This amount of glyphs can be listed manually but I strongly advice to check out Auction Profit Master. With just a single Item Group for your glyphs you can very easily post all your glyphs, check if you've been undercut and repost if needed.
The settings I use for my Glyps Item Group are:
Post cap: 2
Per auction: 1
Undercut by: 1c
Threshold: 20g
Fallback: 65g
Maximum price: 170%

This ensures I will never post below the line of making and losing gold, don't post glyphs at retarded prices (max 110g50s) and only undercut for 1 copper (preventing a rapid decline of listing price due to heavy undercutting).

Just make sure to check your auctions for being undercut whenever possible and relist if needed, don't burn yourself out by re-checking every 15 minutes though.

What I've done so far

Alright, let's see how badly my memory is failing me. I've been playing the Auction House for about three weeks now, and made about 15.000 gold in the process, let's see if I can recall what I have done untill now.

My idea of making gold before was farming Stratholme with my Paladin main character to gather the mats for Crusader enchants. My Paladin is an enchanter and I can easily pull half the instance with him so each run took me about 15 minutes. An hour or two worth of farming gave me enough scrolls of Crusader enchants to last me a week or two. However Stratholme is quite inconvenient to reach and heroic instance queue's were often faster than me clearing what I wanted to clear, even by queuing as dps. So I wanted a better result for time and efford invested.

The first market I went out to explore was selling scrolls of enchants, my main being enchanter was the most important reason for this. I started out with creating a spreadsheet in Excel which listed all the Northrend enchants I could make and formulas to calculate the cost-to-make based on actual Auction House prices. I knew what each enchant would cost me and I could easily check for how much I could sell them. Since I was sitting on a comfortable pile of mats, running loads of heroics as an enchanter has it's advantages, I could make almost all scrolls I predicted would earn me gold. I crafted the scrolls and listed them, manually, on the Auction House. Not all of them sold but some did and I invested the profit in even more Enchanting mats, created more scrolls and listed more scrolls, manually.

My Paladin is an Enchanter / Jewelcrafter, guess what market I dived in after feeling comfortable selling scrolls? That's right, Jewelcrafting! Not a very big success though; it's getting really close to Cataclysm and gems aren't exactly flying of the shelves, on my server at least. Only having a few of the epic cuts and no meta cuts bought with tokens and the high listing prices for gems didn't help either. So I quickly started looking for a more lucrative market than gems.

The only options I had available to me were Herbalism, Alchemy and Inscription, I hate farming so it would have to be Alchemy or Inscription. I didn't feel confident about Alchemy since I don't believe flasks or elixirs will sell properly so I decided to go for Inscription. My scribe was a level 70 alt who's sole purpose was creating Darkmoon cards to give my Death Knight (old main) the Greatness trinket. I hardly did a single Northrend discovery and hadn't learned a single Book of Glyph Mastery.
Attempting to conquer the glyph market really rocketboosted my knowledge of playing the Auction House. You just can't expect to randomly make some glyphs, list them on the Auction House, restock your supplies and make a decent amount of gold in the process. I quickly realised I was about to invest too much time for too little gain, that's not what I wanted to achieve. Luckily I'm not the first to start selling glyphs so all the problems I wanted to solved can be solved easily with some common addons, Auction Profit Master and EasyMail being the most important. Since I've started selling glyphs I've invested a lot of gold in buying the Books of Glyph Mastery which is really starting to pay off. I've doubled my daily glyph income and there's a lot more potential income to gain.

Which brings us to today, me creating this blog :)

My current plans for the nearby future are:
- Find a decent addon to help me craft the glyphs I've sold
- Buy as many Proto-drake Whelps as I can to resell later in Cataclysm
- Level my scribe to 80 in preparation for the Cataclysm changes to professions
- Learn all glyphs on my scribe to increase my daily profit from glyphs

Introduction

Hello,

I'm Coldstream and I've decided to start yet another 'World of Warcraft road to riches' blog. I've been a World of Warcraft player addict for many years now but only recently I've started creating and selling items to make gold pure for making gold. I'll be updating this blog with all the nuggets of wisdom I discover and/or find on the big bad Internet.

Since I've played World of Warcraft since launch (give or take a few weeks) I have some advantages over a much newer player. I already have multiple level 80 characters with maxed out professions (Alchemy, Enchanting, Inscription, Jewelcrafting and Herbalism) and if I really wanted to I could reactivate my girlfriends account and have access to all except Blacksmithing. However since I tackled one market at a time I'm fully convident anyone could do what I have done.
I play on the Horde side of a backwater European server with a very bad Alliance vs Horde ratio, last time I checked it was about 8:1 in favor of the Alliance. Not the best place to be but I call it home :)

Well that should be enough about me, time to start with some real content.